Comments to Maryland PSC on Reliability of Public Charging

The Maryland Public Service Commission held a hearing today on the utilities’ EV Pilot Mid-Course Review in Case No. 9478.

I spoke to the Commissioners via video from a broken charger to stress the need for better reliability for the utilities that are using ratepayer funds to provide public EV charging stations. [Link to YouTube Video] 

Here’s a transcript of those remarks.

Hi, I’m Lanny Hartmann. I want to comment today about the reliability of public charging from an EV driver’s point of view.

I’m at Howard County Community College, this is near my home. The stations behind me opened in January. And if you look behind me, there’s two DC fast chargers. This one right here has a sign, it says “Out of Order.” This sign, I don’t know who put it up but it’s been there since at least September 12. So this station has been inoperable for at least a month.

There’s a station next to it, sometimes both of the stations are down. Today that one is lit. I was here earlier and used the Greenlots card and passed it over the RFID reader and it didn’t recognize it. Luckily I have the Greenlots app which I was able to start a session. But once I started the session, it was only giving me 20 kW. These are 50 kW stations, so I was only getting 40% of the capacity. But I was paying $.34 a kilowatt hour for DC fast charging. The people who have used this have known that this has always been slow. When you come here, you hope this one is working because that one is going to be slow.

You’re talking about fast charges to serve apartments and MUDs. Right across the street, on the other side of the road, there are apartments and condos. Probably at least 100 within a mile of here. Imagine if you depended on these for your daily fill-up and they are down for a month. That’s an issue. 

And these are not the only ones. 

There’s a station that had a ribbon-cutting with the Governor up in Essex, Maryland. That was in April. About six weeks ago, they both went down at the same time. That’s all there is, there’s two DC fast chargers there. They were both down for at least three weeks. Same thing happened about the same time at Kenhill Center in Bowie. Both of those fast chargers went down at the same time and they were down for weeks. Finally, after three weeks, one of them [in Essex] got fixed. The other one is still down.

95% uptime. What would you call that one if it’s only working at 40% capacity? These things need to work.

BGE is asking for $1 million to go from the supposed 95% uptime to 98% guaranteed uptime. I commented before the Commission back in 2018, when you were considering this pilot, and Mr. Chairman, you directed a question to me if I supported it as an EV driver, as a member of the public, as a ratepayer. I remember my comment was, that I expected BGE would have a better way to keep these reliable. Because at the time, I was also concerned about reliability and at that time, I told about some issues with the reliability that we were having before. I based my answer on the supposition that BGE would keep these up like I’m used to BGE keeping the power on and the reliability of my home electric service.

As a ratepayer and as an EV driver, I cannot support $1 million for, as what Commissioner Herman said, to go from [95%] to 98% guaranteed uptime for 2 1/2 years. That almost seems like a ransom. Like, “You’ve got these nice charging stations, now if you want them to work, you’ve got to give me a million dollars.”

I’m also concerned about using hubs of fast chargers as a substitute for Level 2 at the Multi-Unit Dwellings themselves. I think that ultimately, we need to learn how we can get power to people’s parking spaces where they park overnight.

And with that Mr. Chairman, that’s the end of my comments. Thank you very much.

See also: Advocating for EV Charger Reliability at the Maryland PSC